***MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING. This is ultimately a hopeful post but please be mindful when deciding whether or not to read.***

I have experienced some degree of suicidality for a large portion of my life. Often, it was just the vague awareness that I wish I wasn’t alive anymore. Sometimes, it was reckless choices, playing with fate, what if I just don’t look when I cross the street? Once, it was genuinely and desperately begging a loved one to kill me. Often, at times, it was thinking about the ways. And on April 9, 2022, it was a final battle with myself, one I could only win if I lost and only lose if I won. And I lost. And I won.

I think it was kind of a defense mechanism for me to believe that I could control the end of my life. I intensely fear and loathe death. At least if I could be the one to decide, it could be a little neater. There could be some peace in that. But a little over three years and four months ago, I couldn’t take it anymore. I hated myself. I hated my life. I had absolutely nothing left inside of me. I could not envision a world that could possibly get better enough to make up for the pain I was feeling. I was no longer truly able to manage myself, and I was taking so much from and draining everyone who cared about me. I believed more than ever before that the world and the ones who would mourn me would ultimately be better off without me. And I wholeheartedly didn’t want to do it anymore.

I knew how I was going to do it. I just had to do it. I willed myself to go. I tried. I tried. And I was incapable. I was immobilized. I couldn’t even try to die. I cried and I wrote and I felt so sure and yet nothing happened. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t.

That day changed me. It was the day I realized I would never kill myself. Despite considering it for many, many years, I realized that suicide was not an option after all. 

This did not change how badly I felt. If anything, it made it worse. It took that power away from me. It left me helpless to my own existence. Forced me into living. Not violent, but forced.

* * *

The last few months have been really hard. Depression has regained clinical status. And then the lawsuit, my hope at justice which also serves as an arm for my abuser to continue to harm me, became active again. When I was already struggling.

I just looked back at old writings. I reversed my way through the healing I’ve done until I reached the day that I would have killed myself if I could. Rereading this journey, and in reverse, was painful. But it also showed me a few things. How far I’ve come, for sure. That actually, what I’m feeling is nowhere near as intense or unbearable as what I felt back then. And also that as I read my way from the darkest place I can imagine ever being, to acceptance that I would have to keep living, to hurting even worse and losing even more, to not quite hoping but simply articulating what I wished for someday, to where I am today, I realized that although my life is different and there are regrets and scars, I am living a life I could not have hoped for or dreamed of back on the day I could not kill myself. I truly did not believe this future was possible. I never really started to believe it, either. I just kept going, against my will at first and then by choice, and with each moment of life I experienced, my life changed, until it became what it is now.

In losing this idea that giving up was some safety net I could always fall back on, I had to accept this condition of being alive in a way I never really had before. Now, when times get tough, when the best I can do is survive, I fall back on the knowledge that I can always carry on.

I don’t know if this is making sense, but I want to share it to say I have lived it and it is true that things do get better. You can’t even imagine what’s in store. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. Some of it is hard. Some of it is ugly. And some of it is beautiful. Surprising and welcome. Warm and safe and soft and okay. I say this from a place where I’m hurting even today. And I say this not being able to know what else will happen or how it will feel for me or for anyone else. But if this message finds you when you’re in a place where you simply cannot imagine that things can change in a way that makes it worth it, I can say this: You’re right that you can’t imagine it, but you don’t need to be able to imagine it for it to happen. You’re wrong that it cannot be. No matter how sure you are of that. Life is nothing if not unpredictable. I wish for you to keep on experiencing until someday you’re surprised to remember just how bad it feels right now.